I made a script last year that scraped LEGO pricing data from their website. Besides finding out that the Bugatti Bolide Technic set is a pretty good deal as a parts bag, I found that there's only a weak correlation between set size and PPP. The Dots sets throw a wrench in things, of course, and large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered.
My conclusion was that PPP is useful as a bargain-hunting tool, but not as a model for broad price analysis.
LEGO is indeed pretty expensive these times. Not every set is that bad, but the most cars are not only expensive, but not even the best sets on the market...
There is a lot of comparisons, but the most convincing one maybe the LEGO Ferarri (42125) vs. CADA Italian Super Car (C61042W) video[1] of "Held der Steine" (german youtube channel). The LEGO is "parts only" - the CADA is remote controlled with led lights near double the parts of the lego one for the same price.
Many of the newer manufacturers are 100% compatible and provide near double the part count for a similar set. Even if some of them are shameless rip-offs and illegal to have in some countries, most of them are smaller companies with great part quality, prints (no stickers) and innovative designs (see CaDA® C61503W AMG One).
There is also the world of Trains or Tractors, where LEGO tends to fail every time.
I don't think you can compare LEGO with not-LEGO...
Firstly it feels a little sacrilegious, but religion aside quality is often uncomparable and there was this common meme from my childhood that your parents did not love you if you got knockoff LEGOs. Part of the reason why we buy LEGO is because it's LEGO. Buying some other brand (regardless of quality) does not hit the same way.
But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing. Sure, LEGO is quality, but it's not some unbeatable gold standard. At some point it simply becomes one of those things where people ask for Coke instead of Pepsi, even if they can't tell them apart - brand loyalty trumping the desire to simply get the product.
> But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing.
I am not sure this is an accurate assessment. Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery. Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.
The real question is whether the price delta between Lego and pseudo-Lego can justify the quality delta. That's surely subjective up to a point.
> Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery.
Really? I'm not sure about that. I think LEGO built a reputation, because it was patented until 2008 and competitive products were not even a thing.
Mould King was founded 2012, also more than a decade ago.
> Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.
This maybe true for chinese rip-offs, but the more modern approach is innovative, even with licensed models (see CADA MASTER Mercedes-AMG ONE 61503 or Mould King 12025 Orient Express). Features like LED lights, remote controls, remote controlled doors or REAL steam have not been approached by modern LEGO sets.
Where did LEGO have a patent? It certainly wasn't the US. Mega has been here for decades. LEGO tried to sue them under copyright law but lost. My experience with non-LEGO bricks has been extremely mixed, averaging negative.
I think the "LEGO tax" is as much about consistency as marketing inertia. With name-brand LEGO, you know what you're going to get quality-wise. Alternative brands can be unpredictable. I would know; I still have all my LEGO from when I was a kid, and since my family isn't made of money, a lot of them aren't actually LEGO.
Alternative brands can VERY hit-or-miss, and when you miss, you can end up with some truly atrocious pieces. When I was a kid, Mega Bloks was the most common LEGO alternative (in the US, at least), and all of those pieces are terrible. The colors are washed out compared to LEGO, the plates aren't as rigid, and some of the bricks are a mess of scratches and dents.
Consistency is even a problem within individual sets. I also had a couple of LEGO-compatible sets that were made by Hasbro in the mid-2000s, and the part quality is excellent. The pieces have held up really well over the years, and Hasbro's yellow pieces are indistinguishable from LEGO's yellow. Hasbro came correct... except for their wheels, which are the sort of hideous dirt-cheap abomination that even Mega Bloks never stooped to.
Some brands are awful. Some brands are great. Some brands (like Hasbro) somehow managed to put "awful" and "great" inside the very same box. A brand's quality may change wildly over time. Some brands come out with their own extensions to the LEGO "standard," and then never provide a complete system of compatible parts. Sticking to name-brand LEGO offers a much more predictable experience.
A local toy store here has one set of shelves filled with Sluban (about ⅓ the size of their Lego offering), and it's just bleak to see. The shop focused their Sluban offering on military hardware for some reason (perhaps because Lego doesn't do any of that), so you end up with drab boxes of greens and browns, in addition to looking just off in terms of accuracy of the parts.
There's also a bunch of the 'fake' stuff on AliExpress, where you can tell the quality of the bricks is crap just by looking at the low-res photos. Getting the fit of bricks right is apparently quite hard to do if you want to offer lower prices than Lego does.
> I think LEGO has done a great marketing job here... never buy something that is not LEGO, it might be bad quality or scam.
I don't think that was LEGO. I think that was just the off brands being pretty university awful and people caught on.
I'm going through a bucket of loose parts right now, separating the off brands from the LEGO. There are at least 6 different brands in there. The difference is almost always obvious.
And when it's not and the part sneaks its way into my main collection, I can instantly tell when I use it because it either doesn't fit, or fits incorrectly.
The Cada cars definitely look good, the Amg one and Alfa Romeo f1 car are licensed too. Has anyone here actually built them? The interiors seem to be all black parts which could be a headache to get the right piece. Technic sets have good instructions and helpfully colored pieces which makes for a great build experience. Just wondering what it is like to actually bulls a Cada set.
If you are not afraid of german content, you can take a look at "Held der Steine" Twitch channel and Youtube Channel... he does build most of his reviewed content.
Just one "Datapoint", but I have a colleague that works in injection molding. Granted, he works on the "other end" of the size scale (complete car underbodys in one part), but he always said it was more or less a given fact that the two companies wo had "dialed in" their molding processes to near perfection and quality were Lego and Games Workshop in the UK.
LEGO has always had that rep as the injection molding MVP but I have to say I've been really impressed with bandai. They really dominate the model kit space and I find myself noticing how high quality they feel. I've built a bunch of gundams, Star wars, Pokemon, and one piece kits and they were all super fun. I also like how they kind of inspire me to customize them which I don't feel as much with Lego kits these days (I still love Lego but the kits are so good oob I just leave them as is)
So, this is something LEGO is desperately trying to preserve: The opinion that LEGO's prices are reasonable due to better quality and more creative design / higher quality engineering.
The quality in all terms is not better at all... they may be CAPABLE of better quality, but they don't provide it just to reduce costs. That's why they provide stickers instead of prints and holed out plastic parts instead of solit ones. It's cheaper in production. If you compare LEGO parts from 20 to 15 years ago and todays parts, you immediately notice the difference.
There ARE indeed manufacturers and brands that deliver bad quality, but if you pick the non-ripoff brands, the quality may even better.
I’ve seen how much attention Lego puts into designing and making their bricks and sets, as well as their general outlook, so combined with their better quality, fake Lego bricks is not something I want polluting or diluting my/my kid’s Lego.
Empirical evidence. I've tried some fake brick sets, most of them were obviously not as good. The QC is worse for sure, but it's the little things - sometimes it's weight, sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's color that is slightly "off".
Those "other bricks" are quite useful when you want something that Lego won't produce. For example gimp figurine for your Pulp Fiction diorama.
I don't think that LEGO is better. They also have slightly off color, non fitting parts. Especially the "glass" parts are worse than Cada or BlueBrixx, but I'm not trying to convince anyone.
I think that everyone can pick whatever liked. However, the term "fake LEGO" is a bit weird, because the other manufacturers also have well designed parts LEGO does not provide...
In general, their brick quality isn't on par with Lego. The clutching of Lego bricks is finely weighed and consistent. The colouring is brighter. They don't have nasty toxic smells and paints. The set catalogues are more diverse with many more themes. Set designs are original and matching the age group. There is also historical significance and nostalgia for certain sets and themes, and they can be re-released as new sets with modern building techniques and new parts.
Is this based on your own recent experience? I recently got into the mood to build some LEGO again, after not having done it since childhood, but I recoiled at the prices of current LEGO sets. Got something from BlueBrixx instead and am really happy with it. The bricks look great, feel satisfying to put together and I can't tell a difference from how I remember it from all those years ago.
I definitely remembers seeing some Mega Bloks some 15-20 years ago and they were really really bad like you described but from what I can tell, other competitors have actually caught up to LEGO nowadays.
They really aren't that far off these days. Certainly no 'nasty toxic smells/paints'. Brick fit/clutching can be a bit sub-par on certain parts, but is generally not far from the real thing.
Lego does a much better job of instruction books than the 'fake Lego' sets I've seen, though. Also, Lego has higher standards for the model designs themselves, whereas some of the 'fake Lego' model designs can be rather more fragile than anything Lego would release, which adds to the impression of poor brick fit/clutching (e.g. the Xingbao Xenomorph)
(Haven't seen any of the Technic clones, though. They're likely to suffer more from loose or poorly-fitting parts)
I have sort of got out of lego because of this very issue. Some of the end sets look cool but do not feel 'lego' anymore to me. Take something like the latest millennium falcon. I have the previous version of that behemoth that someone gave me. Most of the set is 'filler'. Basically empty void with a fragile shell on the outside that looks cool and incredibly tedious to put the gribblies on. The worst of these was the star wars star destroyer. It was huge. But mostly empty void on a frame and hundreds of very tiny decorative parts. The newer incarnations look a bit better but, I feel sort of ripped off. The Lamborghini looks very lego'y. I just do not want a lime green one. Precisely because of that detracts from the lego'y bit of it. Those pieces are pretty much only good for that one set. Lego has leaned hard into the model style of 3d puzzles with their sets. It probably saved their company. But it at this point is getting rather silly price wise. I can get the knock off brands and have a much more interesting selection of models if I want to go that way.
But seriously, the cost is so worth it for me. As someone who has attention span challenges from time to time, LEGO puts me into a flow state like almost nothing else. I love a good 2-3 night session putting together a big set.
It doesn't work for me, I do have ADD and lego puts me into flow, but after that I kust feel bad that I spent time and money on something without actual value.
Thinking I could have spend that time on chores, home improvement or side projects...
But what do you mean without value you said it makes you feel good that's the best value ever.
Money is not like time - if you don't spend money you get to keep it. If you don't spend time, you waste it. You can't do chores all the time so instead of just doing nothing why not doing something that makes you feel good just for the sake of it
If you want to experience true frustration, try buying one of those 3d metal kits which require a set of pliers to assemble. The instructions are incredibly sparse and an incredible amount of precision is required.
If you want a bit of an increased challenge, Gundam models tend to be a bit more difficult than Lego while still feeling stimulating and fun.
I've built a few metal earth models. It is not very easy, but if you have a good plier set, perfectly doable! It puts you in a flow, just like with Lego, and the result looks nicer than Lego, for less money.
Just like the article, you really have to correct for outliers to make PPP work. It's more of a "rule of thumb" that you can use to determine if something is, as you said, a bargain worth getting even if it is outside your main area.
Bricklink's "part out" tool is more accurate, but some pieces get priced "wrong" and you have to know enough to determine that.
I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.
I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.
An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...
So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...
We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.
Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.
Part existence probability changes every couple of months, probably not enough time for you to be able to make good estimates.
LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away. I believe I have more than 99% of all the LEGO I or my parents ever bought, going back to 1976 or 7.
Tell that to my Mother. She threw away all of our 1970s and 1980s legos, transformers, Star Wars, He-man, etc. toys after we left home. Didn’t even donate them - straight to the landfill.
I was surprised by how complete some sets of mine where when they came over. I don't doubt the 99%, although in my case they are not mine any longer as such, but my five year old son's.
Lego stashes do indeed get hoarded for a generation at a time; a lot of it is kept as valuable for the next generation (lucky bastards).
> LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away.
I doubt this. Outside Lego enthusiasts, most people see it as a children's toy which is probably disgustingly covered in saliva and in no fit state for anyone else to touch. It's one of the first things to go into the trash when more space is needed in the attic.
You can put them into a pillowcase and wash in a washing machine.
Given how expensive Legos are many people will gladly pick them up from your place, especially if you live in a city. You can look up Buy Nothing and similar groups in your area on FB.
My conclusion was that PPP is useful as a bargain-hunting tool, but not as a model for broad price analysis.
Here's that for anyone interested:
https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego...